How are you keeping your associates up to date on Microsoft changes? HELP

We keep associates updated through a mix of curated communication and self-service resources. Key practices that work:

• Intake & vetting: Only relevant Microsoft 365 changes are vetted for impact on our environment.
• Centralized updates: Weekly digest via email/newsletter summarizing key Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and Copilot changes.
• Internal champions: “Power users” in each department test and highlight updates, sharing tips in short video clips or demos.
• Self-service & training: Use Viva Learning and SharePoint pages for guides, how-tos, and FAQs.
• Engaging updates: Include screenshots, short GIFs, and actionable steps rather than long texts.

This combination ensures updates are timely, actionable, and easy to consume.

Hello Shikenya​ , a few ideas based on what I've done before

• Regular Champion Community calls where you present and demo new features (I agree with Josh that this does not need to be done for every little change), open room for questions, address concerns. Prepare some ready to use materials and distribute to the Champions so they can pass it to their groups of people. Recognize the Champions for doing it.
• Create news articles/videos for features with high impact, work with your IT teams including Support so they are aware of what content is available when users report issues (or ask for help).
• Sharing SharePoint news posts as email have been helpful OR feed the news post into the company intranet by working with the Comms teams who are in charge of the intranet.
• I've used Viva Engage as well as Teams in Microsoft Teams for the community. They work in similar ways. Teams allowed us to plug in automations with Power Platform to manage the community. Now, there is "Copilot Adoption Community" available within Viva Engage which looks like a great platform for adoption of Copilot.

We have a ueser group and host monthly 1-hour Teams meeting to educate users and bring new features to their attention. Topics are a combination of "what's new", topics from our users, and questions that the help desk is getting related to M365 products. Users are always interested in "tips and tricks" for Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, and Planner. Currently we do not co-mingle Copilot into the meetings because not all employees are licensed, but we do have a channel devoted to Copilot where users can post questions and exchange best practices. 

Hey Shikenya, 

Here's the process we use in our org:
We host weekly stakeholder review session containing reps from the key technical areas (365 admin, security, entra, adoption etc). We triage the message centre tickets (there's a link from the admin centre that creates a planner board from message centre tickets, we use a custom ADO board but that's just preference). Basically if investigation is required, an engineer will take a look and then bring it back for review (do we turn the feature on, does it need integrating with a wider project, no action required etc). Tickets are then passed to adoption for comms review. Some tickets come straight to comms.

We then collate and release a Sway monthly, containing all the upcoming changes, re-writing some of the language to make it accessible to end users. It's published via our Champions Network and as an announcement on our Viva Engage community.

TO make them easy to understand we tend to strip out most of the message to try and understand what benefit there is to colleagues, or whether there is a change that requires them to action (eg a button is moving etc). By collating them and releasing monthly, there's always a good few exciting updates to help sprinkle through some of the dry ones. 

My best tip though is to ask yourself 'so what?' for each change. Not every change needs communicating to end-users, either because it's niche or won't be disruptive to end user experience. Sometimes, informing service desk is more than enough.